Yeah, I still have my copy of Windows 1.02 on floppies, too. I just can't bring myself to throw them away. At some point I ditched the 5-1/4" Memorex disc that held an entire summer's worth of coding in basic and assembler/machine code (the one with the stiff cardboard sleeve and the Memorex name expanding from an M to the full word as it repeated down the sleeve). I think I keep the windows as proof of original license, but realized that the 120kb apple disc probably wouldn't really get me anything. Besides, who needs yet another copy of hello world, the alphabet printing backwards, or four different programs to generate D&D character stats?
Are you afraid there is some kind of widespread tampering or falsification which will oddly give one side or the other an 80% victory?
We could allow in "international inspectors," but it wouldn't change much. Since balloting is a state-by-state procedure, as set out in the constitution, there will be variations in form all over the country. With the exception of very, very few precincts, you'll find practically zero irregularities, and none which materially affect all by the closest of elections. And in the closest of elections, one might argue that either side has a legitimate right to claim support from a near-majority.
The problem - or solution - you are craving is for citizens of the US to actually participate in the election process. You want people to (1) register (2) verify their registration and polling place is correct long before election day (3) educate themselves on the issues (4) have a reasonable grasp of international politics, economics, military, science and the other various relevant topics and (5) vote for the person who they believe will provide positive leadership on those issues in alignment with their beliefs. I think something like half the eligible citizens in the US vote at all, and I'd further suggest that of that half, at least 9 out of 10 would fail a test which asked them to identify 20 substantive details of the platform of their candidate.
Don't blame the system for a failure of the electorate. Humans, probably up to about the top 60 or 70th percentile, simply don't have the reasoning capacity to choose the "best" leadership.
It exists, and - from what I understand - Obama has it as the basis of his health care plan. The FEHB (Federal Employee Health Benefits) system is a group of about 2 million federal employees and retirees which has several "competing" plans which are offered by private insurers. They have different costs, and the government provides employees/retirees with 75% reimbursement up to a fixed annual limit. You can imagine that most of the options maximize the benefits to hit that limit mark. There are some cheaper plans, and some more expensive, as well. The group is a pretty good cross section of the US, since it has a wide range of employees, in a wide range of jobs, and includes all federal pensioners.
As I read it, Obama wants to open enrollment up to "everybody" (I'm not sure how everybody is defined: citizens, legal residents, etc...), with financial assistance for those who cannot afford the various plans. Now, this is _not_ socialized medicine - it's just a very large group for negotiating purposes. It is still a private healthcare based system, with multiple providers. But since it acts like a group there is no penalty for switching plans, no pre-existing condition exclusions, and we presume "anyone" can buy in. The details are murky - how do we pay for those who need extra help (a family plan is about $12k/yr), how/when can you enroll (buying in right after you are diagnosed with cancer isn't financially sound), and will the plans be opened up for small (or any) businesses to purchase for their employees through this avenue. I mention the last because I run a small business. My premiums are affordable because we're all young and healthy. If someone in my office got serious cancer, I'd probably not be able to afford the new premiums. The FEHB system is more expensive than what I pay (bigger, sicker group), but not nearly as much as I could face if we had a major illness of one of the four in my office.
BTW - preexisting conditions are no longer excludable in group plans in the US, and group plans cannot drop or exclude an individual within a group. With 2M existing "customers," the big insurance players can't afford to just ignore the FEHB program. If the program weren't already filled with the elderly (retirees), I woudl be concerned about rate increases, but it's already a sickly bunch, as far as health insurance groups are concerned.
Oh, and as for socialized medicine - I think many people wouldn't know the difference. There are a very vocal minority who, on the other hand, actively seek out doctors with whom they have rapport. I'm one of those. If your experinces with healthcare are primarily the emergency room and whomever is on duty at the time, then socialized medicine looks just like private care. Just about anywhere you can find good doctors and bad doctors. In socialized medicine you get the luck of the draw - and that can mean very good care. In private care, you get a choice (to and extent) - and your care is predicated on how well you chose. We have outstanding care at the top because there is a financial incentive for it; by the same token, though, if you aren't rich, you're probably never going to see that level of care.
But the transcoding operations change from generation to generation. If we put a chip in for every possible codec, we'd still miss all the future codecs which have yet to be developed. Though the CPU is inefficient, it can be re-tasked to meet the new requirements. There are limits, but I'd rather not have to get a new $50-$100 PCI card each time a new a/v codec comes out. What good is a $200 iPod if you need to buy a $100 add-on card? Actually, that was often the case back in the 80s, when processors really were too slow to do anything dedicated, and it sucked.
No, having no children will solve the problem. You, and many others, have the very common inability to comprehend low probability events. Let's presume that, over the next four generations, you get 2000 geniuses who could reasonably advance science to the point that we could cut our impact on the planet by 75% in terms of energy used or energy directly from solar. That's revolutionary, given the immense resources we use in the world, and would require a massive shift in the way things are done in addition to the solar.
Now, instead lets presume that most people forego children, and only 1/8 of the population produces offspring (one child for every other four couples). Lets further presume that we lose _all_ 2000 geniuses and we get no revolution in energy efficiency. If after this period we go back to the 1:1 offspring ratio, which is a bit below the current status quo, we'll wind up with an 87% reduction in impact from human activity, all other things being equal.
So your geniuses will probably have to defy the laws of physics as we know them in order to even come close to just reducing population.
Besides, if we radically reduced population, it would send the world into a massive depression with all the falling real estate prices (too many homes, businesses, etc. and not enough people), which would further depress output. See - problem solved!
Neither of these is, of course, either likely or possible. The chance of not having a theoretical child who might become a future energy genius is diminishingly small and is a poor reason to have a child.
I second that. Transcoding is a big deal, and not just for folks ripping their commercial videos to servers. It takes several days to complete a full transcode my FLAC audio files to the preferred compressed flavor of my audio player, which changes every year or three. I do it very infrequently because of the time it takes. I would prefer to sync with the device on the fly, but processing speeds are just too slow to do that. I'd rather leave the computer running for a couple days once and then sync from that pool (in a couple of minutes), than have to sync for hours every time I connect and change out the content.
It would also nice to be able to cut together home movies and get the final encode times in the minutes range instead of the hours range.
And then, of course, there are hideously inefficient programs like AutoCAD and Adobe Acrobat. I have yet to figure out how updating a cursor position on the screen takes 1.2 billion operations per second, or typing text takes 2 billion and still can't keep up with my slow keyboarding, but AutoCAD appears to have made that happen. And trying to render large PDFs, both for printing and general browsing of large documents is painfully slow. I want to flip through pages of a PDF like I flip though pages of a book, and even when I have a 24x36 sheet of.1" high text which has been vector drawn, I want it to take far less than than the 8-10 seconds it takes to draw the page today...1/5 second is probably the right threshold.
You sound as if you think I'm a McCain supporter. Well, I'll admit there are things I like about him, but (a) I could never support any move which would forward Palin's career as a politician - she's absolute poison - and (b) his radical shift to the religious right in the past 8 years has been embarrassing, and Im not even a registered Republican.
Of course I'll be voting for Obama, and I fully expect him to win. There hasn't been this kind of excitement in the D party for almost half a century, and I think it's well founded. He is the right person to fix our international image, he's the right person to oversee the balance between corporate and personal interests during this economic recovery, and with luck he'll be the right person to persuade an expansion of access to healthcare while keeping the broad market-based service Americans expect. Oh, and RvW will be revisited and overturned if two more conservatives get appointed to the high court. I can simply hope that his SCOTUS choices happen to have a good stance on citizens' stake in the IP battles ahead. It's a fringe issue for the mainstream, really. Luckily, the high court is less corruptible by the same lobbying that forces lopsided laws through congress.
Nobody ever suggested you could run anything on an iPhone, and that makes it no different that most of the other cellular phone devices out there. It comes down to the simplest of playground rules:
My ball, my game.
Not that the playground is the perfect metaphor for business, but it's better than most car analogies.
We got hit by Iraq? Wow, I missed that invasion. Was it naval? Which cities were invaded and had to repel the foreign forces?
Or were you talking about the 9/11 thing where a bunch of militants from a NGO flew planes into several buildings? Did they get funding from Iraq? Perhaps, but they also got funding from Saudi sources and were based out of Afghanistan with that governments "protection."
The invasion of Iraq was sparked by the WMD scare based on faulty intellegence, which was trumped up to whip the country (and world) into a panic...all the way to a little bottle of "chemical agent" shown by Colin Powell to the UN. Sadly, it turned out to be bullshit - and nobody dared call the administration on it.
I won't argue that Saddam was a horrible leader, and that there were terrible things happening in Iraq. But, seriously, there are more problems in the world than we can fix as a single country, and military fixes are a very poor way to try and convince people to see democracy our way. We have done many good things in Iraq, but that doesn't justify, in hindsight, our reason to invade.
I'd be in your boat if Hillary had won and Palin weren't on the ticket. I can't stand either of them. It's amazing how similar they are, while holding diametrically opposed sociopolitical beliefs. I do agree with you that, in the event McCain wins, he goes back the man he was in 2000 and kicks some serious congressional butt and fixes the deficit and debt before he starts handing money back.
I don't pay much now either, though I just switched to a company group plan (I own the company and felt it was the right thing to do for my employees as soon as I was big enough to form a group). I had a HSA for three years - and they're awesome for a healthy, young person. I spend even less than you for me and my daughter; about $600-800 per year. Wish I could have kept it, but it's not really practical for some of my employees.
Here's the thing - once you get older you're very, very likely to have some sort of maintenance medication; or have to take a course of medication. Pay for a month of, say a blood thinner (if you have a minor stroke or heart attack) or a less usual antibiotic and you could be in for $500-$1000. Maintenance meds, say for diabetes, will run you about $300/month if you are well regulated and don't have problems. Price a colonoscopy or a mammogram with a secondary ultrasound. Lets just say you've got a four figure bill _after_ the health insurance discount.
I'm not old enough to worry about such things, but the people we're talking about are. When you get old things start to break down more frequently. You might be healthy right up to the day you fall over dead, but that's the wild exception, not the rule. If you set basic coverage with a $2400 deductible for seniors, they'll probably hit it every year.
By the way - you will probably want, at some point in the future, to go onto a group plan. See, if you're on an individual plan and you have a problem, your insurance will go up. If you develop a chronic condition (like diabetes), you're likely to be dropped from insurance. They can do that for individuals. For group plans, they can't drop an individual of the group. It's why I have been saying for a decade now that the US govt should open up their FEHB (fed health) program to any US citizen. It's a group of negotiated healthcare rates with several providers, including HMO, PPO, and HSA plans. The group is so large (2,000,000+) and the group includes so may high-risk people (all federal retirees) that the rates are probably close to the general population. Obama is the first candidate to come to the same conclusion an I did. Now, I don't know how he's going to fund getting everybody on the rolls, but simply making it _available_ is a great first step.
While it would be possible to live on $20k per year, it's not exactly living high on the hog. Even if your median-cost house is paid off, you're probably looking at $2000/yr in just taxes and minimal insurance. In many places, taxes are much higher (up to triple that number). $10k for food, $2k for housing that's paid for (god forbid you rent), $4k for health related expenses, $2500 for basic lifeline phone and heat, and you've got $1500 for transportation and all other miscellaneous expenses, and that's presuming you aren't paying for any healthcare premiums. I'd say that's pretty close to "keeping the elderly from starving and being homeless."
The problem with that justification is that there is no record of how many times a particular file has been redistributed. They have attempted to show that downloads have occurred by having their agent download the data, but that has also hit roadblocks.
It may be the case that a file is downloaded 10, 20, or 1000 times. For a balanced p2p network, though, the higher numbers are more unlikely. for a single song uploaded, it may then be downloaded twice with only one additional download charged. If we presume that there are a billion people on the internet, and the series is balanced, then the file need only be downloaded 31 times (2^30, i.e. 30 downloads, plus 1 to get to the original 2 computers) from the original host. That would put the damages at $31.69 from the original host, or about $95 for treble damages in the worst possible statistical case - again given an efficient network. Since the likelihood of a billion downloads from a single source is highly unlikely - the number is probably more likely to top out between 10,000 and 100,000, or $13-$17 per file (Again, $40-50 with treble damages for willful distribution).
While it is theoretically possible to upload many more copies, it is unlikely given that so many programs automatically share all downloaded files by default.
Now, you could end up with quite a bill if you shared a large collection (mine is close to 8000 tracks), but realistically not all those tracks would be uploaded, and very few would cross the 1000 download mark. One might argue that for any common song, the number of seeders present at the time your timestamp would be the basis for the calculation starting point. If you might expect between 20 and 1000 people to have the same track in their library (not unlikely). That starts the power series at 2^5 or 2^10, leaving you closer to $7-8 per file shared, or $25 with treble damages - presuming you can even set a likely number of downloads.
That's a far cry from the $750/song they're asking, or the $150,000 they could pursue. Since standard civil law usually only allows treble damages, it would suggest that the law is severly skewed and should be reviewed by the high court. I wonder who Obama will pick for the two empty seats on the SCOTUS, and what their take on this issue is.
Makes my new home theater look that much more cost competitive!
Seriously, though, this might be fun for a night out. $35 a seat; $70 a couple plus dinner, if it's not foolishly priced (say, entree and side and a beverage for under $40 pp) wouldn't be much more than a night out at Morton's.
Heck, with regular tickets north of $10 in cheap areas, an extra $50 for a "quality" setting might appeal to a certain crowd.
(Actually, given the bits of the HT I built, I'm only in about $2k over the playroom we were finishing anyway. Plus the wine and food is cheaper, although I have to cook. Still, a show a month would cover my costs. WooHoo!)
Taxes and the government programs they fund are not charity, because taxes are taken against your will under penalty of imprisonment.
To turn the tables - if you don't like it, go find another country.
A right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
Have you seen what you get from social security? It's darned near poverty level. The average benefit is something like $13,000 per year, though new retirees may be getting closer to $22,000. I don't know what you think basic living expenses are, but that's putting it pretty far down. Of course, you can continue to work and make money for that cable TV bill so it looks like you're livin' it up while on the dole, but if you make too much (over $13k), you'll see your check drop. I don't care where you live, $22k isn't going to leave room for much more than basic OTA retransmits from most cable cos. I'm a particularly frugal person - my wife and I spend about $220/wk on practically all our daily expenses - groceries, entertainment, personal care, misc. stuff, etc. (no monthly bills) - that's almost $12k per year. Add in power, insurance, non-covered health care costs, transportation and rent and you're probably over the limit in all but a very few places of the country.
By the way - basic healthcare has a pretty dangerous definition. How much does your basic cover? If you have to come up with $4k a year in co-pays and deductable (not uncommon) for "basic" healthcare - and that's easy to do with regular physician visits, standard lab work, one or two minor issues (cold/flu/in-office procedures), and maintenance medication, that's going to stress that $22k budget pretty hard.
Now, I'll agree that average mortality has risen, and I'd prefer the benefits reflect that shift. The original SS system kicked in at the average US mortality age. I think that's not too bad an idea, personally. Still, the age of full benefits is continually increasing, with standard benefits now available at 67 (I think the avg mort age is 77 or 78 now).
So the question is whether we can even afford to allow SS to continually grow as a welfare program for more and more able-bodied people, or whether we should put it back to its stated purpose of preventing the truly elderly from becoming destitute.
I agree that it should be shifted older. People shouldn't be "counting" on SS for retirement, they should be counting on it for the unplanned circumstance of running out of money because you lived too long. I also think that by shifting the age of benefits should come with a shift in benefits to reflect financial pressures on the aged population. Of course, I'd also like to see the system "right-sized" to balance the tax revenue with the payments. Unfortunately, I think the system is so fucked that it's not going to survive the BB generation without massive restructuring, because all the money that has been "set aside" for their SS has actually been spent on other things.
Nice if you can get it, but not really mainstream. My brother in law is a very good MS tech, and was extremely impressed with the 2008 he installed on his laptop. He was concerned it would be a Vista-like experience, which he had tried and rejected already.
Kinda funny, the only thing I use Vista for is a media computer (well, mostly just a movie machine). It's not perfect, but it does a reasonably good job with little setup and maintenance. I do hope 7 is more like 2k8 than vista, as I'm eventually going to have to switch everyone in the office off of XP. I'm not really looking forward to that, mostly beauase I'm not trained in IT, and the further I get from NT (the only real GUI OS I learned the internals of) the harder it gets to find all the places MS likes to hide things.
I don't think the Rs have been socially liberal in the last 4 or 5 decades. The Republicans have, imho, turned into the Christian Right party, and have really pushed a social agenda of intolerance. It's depressing to see, as the large Christian population in the US seems to have been galvanized against non-Christians and traditional minorities. It's easy to forget that black and hispanic citizens are overwhelmingly Christian as well when they don't sit in the pews across from you on Sundays.
Unfortunately, I think the surplus taxes we had in the late 90s and beginning of 2000 (practically none of which was Clinton's doing, btw) were hopelessly squandered on additional government graft and then tax cuts that weren't really necessary to enhance economic growth. The whole security fiasco after 9/11 has been insanely expensive, with very little positive effect. The costs in both taxpayer dollars, and lost opportunity (hours wasted by businesses) has been enormous. And then the unnecessary war in Iraq. With real fiscal care, we probably could have halved the national debt by now. While it certainly would have had repercussions for exporting manufacturers, we could have a very strong dollar today.
No, it has been proven that both parties suck. A study done a couple of months ago projected the two candidates total debt over the next 5 or 8 years, and McCain came out $1T higher than Obama, though both managed to increase the debt. Oddly, I think the fiscally conservative choice is the Democrats. Of course, I have a personal reason for voting Obama - he's the first person to suggest opening up the (private) US govt health benefits program to citizens. It's an expensive plan, don't get me wrong, but it is very good and would provide a stable place for anyone to get long term health coverage. Given that individual plans can be terminated if you get sick, having a guaranteed group plan that can't "kick you out" is a big deal.
Looks like the cheapest option is a 5 CAL install, at $999 SRP - about $700 OEM street price. Hard to swallow for a legitimate license of the software.
I feel your pain...or rather I felt your pain in the past. About 10 years ago my wife and I made "too much" to get a tax deduction for education tuition we paid and still didn't make enough to afford any local housing (LA basin). Even with a child, I don't think that the child tax credits / deductions are a good idea. They tend to trick stupid people into thinking that if they have more children their taxes with go down and they'll have more money at the end of the day. Personally, I think the government should be doing more PSAs on the cost of raising children - make people understand the $15,000+/yr cost to raise them to age 18 and they might think twice about skipping the rubbers.
While I wouldn't give up my daughter for anything, the resource drain for just basic stuff is staggering. I honestly don't know how someone on basic wages makes ends meet without seriously missing something.
Probably not. Generally, all the terms of service can provide for is termination of service. Now, if there are copyright or other IP violations, that's a separate matter, but this sounds like data which is not copyrightable. Unauthorized access usually means that you have _accessed_ a computer without authorization (such as through someone else's account). Here, they're getting legitimate accounts but _using_ them in a way that was not permitted or authorized. Note that the difference is in unauthorized _use_ versus unauthorized _access_. The Blizzard case was, iirc, a civil case, not a criminal one. While a civil case could be brought in this instance, it would be the corporation on the filing, not the individual.
It's cheap relative to the existing small Dell laptops. The E4200 is the latest in the line - 12" screen, intel processors, battery life exceeding 6 hours (much more with the add-on battery), and thinner (.8" vs.9"), lighter (2.2lb vs 2.7), and with more options generally, including a full-up docking station option.
Sure, the newest series will set you back 2 grand (though sales do come up quite frequently), but the older versions which are the D4xxx series can be found on ebay for about $400-$600. They are, of course, a smidge heavier and thicker that the mini 12 (3lb and 1"), but - again - they're a full pc for what you're paying for a netbook.
Me? Well, the wife has a D420. It's fantastic. I am trying to decide between a precision M2400 and an M6400 - light and nimble vs. no compromises speed and having to reinforce the seams in my backpack. I've got an M70 as my primary machine, and it's good but getting a bit long in the tooth for my CAD apps. I'm still waiting for a netbook in a tablet form factor. I'd really like to have something about 2lbs that I can turn portrait and just surf/read PDFs with a pop-up onscreen keyboard.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be selective with the child deductions - I don't see a reason for anyone to get them. I'm not right enough to suggest people pay additional taxes for each child - though that would make sense as so many government services are geared towards children. Of course, I'd pay quite a bit extra without the credit, having a child myself.
I'm not specifically opposed to it (the EIC), as I think the basis has merit and don't necessarily have a suggestion for fixing it. But it is something that people have to consider when talking about brackets - very few people realize that this "negative" bracket exists.
I still agree with a higher poster that the "resdistribution" is scare tactic bullshit; easily 90% of the electorate for both sides receives more services than they pay for anyway.
I'll grant that sole proprietors get dicked in a variety of ways,
Actually the sole proprietor, along with S-corps, get a pretty wide variety of benefits. Overall, the smart self employed can deduct many things that an employee cannot. The savvy businessman can make much of their mileage tax deductible. Sure you pay both sides of FICA, but you're also getting paid what you "bill", which is a lot more than what wages are (generally 200% to 400%).
I hold very little regard for business people who complain about taxes. I run a small business (S-corp), 5 years old, with 4 employees. Yes, taxes suck but guess what - I don't pay all that much. I get to put away over $15k a year into retirement accounts. My wife, who works 10-15 hours a week can put away another $15k. We get the child tax credit even if she doesn't work "enough" because she drives a company car and about 50% of the automotive expenses get put on her W2 as "income".We pay taxes on that...but they really just go to getting the CTC back.
As a bonus, I take a reasonable salary and then everything else that comes in is "profit," taken as an owner's draw and not subject to FICA.
Part of being in business is having someone who can make the right decisions. My wife just so happens to have been an accountant for a decade, and has done some HR. My accountant, who gets $700-$1000 a year from me, makes sure we're paying all the taxes required, and taking all the deductions we are allowed to. Heck, I get to write off $100k a year in capital expenses if I have the income to use. Quite honestly, if I get to the point where I'm making - no, profiting - $250,000 a year after all expenses, I'm not going to be bitching about paying an extra 3-4% of the dollars over $250,000. It's just not something I'm going to waste time worrying about.
Well, it goes directly to "poor" people, too. Unfortunately (sort of) there is a negative tax bracket in this country. It's called the earned income tax credit. I'm not really, really against it, but it does cause some issues with making taxes somewhat fair and equitable. Having a negative bracket, imho, is a bit too far. Then again, I don't think you should get a tax break for having kids - in the modern world, they're an optional luxury. (FWIW, I have one, and that's all I feel I can afford).
As for the top tax brackets - yes I feel they should pay more. Hell, I'd be happy to see a 7.5% "bonus" tax kick in right where Social Security taxes stop. But that wouldn't be very popular. Besides, if small business owners manage to profit more than $250k/yr, the best way to reduce thta tax liability is to expand the business with either capital investments or - better yet - more employees or better benefits. Every dollar spent on employees is deducted from your taxable income. QED. Invest back in your community and the government won't take any more of your money. Keep it to yourself, and the government will use some of that extra to provide services - some of which (surprise) will end up back in your community!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I still have my copy of Windows 1.02 on floppies, too. I just can't bring myself to throw them away. At some point I ditched the 5-1/4" Memorex disc that held an entire summer's worth of coding in basic and assembler/machine code (the one with the stiff cardboard sleeve and the Memorex name expanding from an M to the full word as it repeated down the sleeve). I think I keep the windows as proof of original license, but realized that the 120kb apple disc probably wouldn't really get me anything. Besides, who needs yet another copy of hello world, the alphabet printing backwards, or four different programs to generate D&D character stats?
Are you afraid there is some kind of widespread tampering or falsification which will oddly give one side or the other an 80% victory?
We could allow in "international inspectors," but it wouldn't change much. Since balloting is a state-by-state procedure, as set out in the constitution, there will be variations in form all over the country. With the exception of very, very few precincts, you'll find practically zero irregularities, and none which materially affect all by the closest of elections. And in the closest of elections, one might argue that either side has a legitimate right to claim support from a near-majority.
The problem - or solution - you are craving is for citizens of the US to actually participate in the election process. You want people to (1) register (2) verify their registration and polling place is correct long before election day (3) educate themselves on the issues (4) have a reasonable grasp of international politics, economics, military, science and the other various relevant topics and (5) vote for the person who they believe will provide positive leadership on those issues in alignment with their beliefs. I think something like half the eligible citizens in the US vote at all, and I'd further suggest that of that half, at least 9 out of 10 would fail a test which asked them to identify 20 substantive details of the platform of their candidate.
Don't blame the system for a failure of the electorate. Humans, probably up to about the top 60 or 70th percentile, simply don't have the reasoning capacity to choose the "best" leadership.
It exists, and - from what I understand - Obama has it as the basis of his health care plan. The FEHB (Federal Employee Health Benefits) system is a group of about 2 million federal employees and retirees which has several "competing" plans which are offered by private insurers. They have different costs, and the government provides employees/retirees with 75% reimbursement up to a fixed annual limit. You can imagine that most of the options maximize the benefits to hit that limit mark. There are some cheaper plans, and some more expensive, as well. The group is a pretty good cross section of the US, since it has a wide range of employees, in a wide range of jobs, and includes all federal pensioners.
As I read it, Obama wants to open enrollment up to "everybody" (I'm not sure how everybody is defined: citizens, legal residents, etc...), with financial assistance for those who cannot afford the various plans. Now, this is _not_ socialized medicine - it's just a very large group for negotiating purposes. It is still a private healthcare based system, with multiple providers. But since it acts like a group there is no penalty for switching plans, no pre-existing condition exclusions, and we presume "anyone" can buy in. The details are murky - how do we pay for those who need extra help (a family plan is about $12k/yr), how/when can you enroll (buying in right after you are diagnosed with cancer isn't financially sound), and will the plans be opened up for small (or any) businesses to purchase for their employees through this avenue. I mention the last because I run a small business. My premiums are affordable because we're all young and healthy. If someone in my office got serious cancer, I'd probably not be able to afford the new premiums. The FEHB system is more expensive than what I pay (bigger, sicker group), but not nearly as much as I could face if we had a major illness of one of the four in my office.
BTW - preexisting conditions are no longer excludable in group plans in the US, and group plans cannot drop or exclude an individual within a group. With 2M existing "customers," the big insurance players can't afford to just ignore the FEHB program. If the program weren't already filled with the elderly (retirees), I woudl be concerned about rate increases, but it's already a sickly bunch, as far as health insurance groups are concerned.
Oh, and as for socialized medicine - I think many people wouldn't know the difference. There are a very vocal minority who, on the other hand, actively seek out doctors with whom they have rapport. I'm one of those. If your experinces with healthcare are primarily the emergency room and whomever is on duty at the time, then socialized medicine looks just like private care. Just about anywhere you can find good doctors and bad doctors. In socialized medicine you get the luck of the draw - and that can mean very good care. In private care, you get a choice (to and extent) - and your care is predicated on how well you chose. We have outstanding care at the top because there is a financial incentive for it; by the same token, though, if you aren't rich, you're probably never going to see that level of care.
But the transcoding operations change from generation to generation. If we put a chip in for every possible codec, we'd still miss all the future codecs which have yet to be developed. Though the CPU is inefficient, it can be re-tasked to meet the new requirements. There are limits, but I'd rather not have to get a new $50-$100 PCI card each time a new a/v codec comes out. What good is a $200 iPod if you need to buy a $100 add-on card? Actually, that was often the case back in the 80s, when processors really were too slow to do anything dedicated, and it sucked.
No, having no children will solve the problem. You, and many others, have the very common inability to comprehend low probability events. Let's presume that, over the next four generations, you get 2000 geniuses who could reasonably advance science to the point that we could cut our impact on the planet by 75% in terms of energy used or energy directly from solar. That's revolutionary, given the immense resources we use in the world, and would require a massive shift in the way things are done in addition to the solar.
Now, instead lets presume that most people forego children, and only 1/8 of the population produces offspring (one child for every other four couples). Lets further presume that we lose _all_ 2000 geniuses and we get no revolution in energy efficiency. If after this period we go back to the 1:1 offspring ratio, which is a bit below the current status quo, we'll wind up with an 87% reduction in impact from human activity, all other things being equal.
So your geniuses will probably have to defy the laws of physics as we know them in order to even come close to just reducing population.
Besides, if we radically reduced population, it would send the world into a massive depression with all the falling real estate prices (too many homes, businesses, etc. and not enough people), which would further depress output. See - problem solved!
Neither of these is, of course, either likely or possible. The chance of not having a theoretical child who might become a future energy genius is diminishingly small and is a poor reason to have a child.
I second that. Transcoding is a big deal, and not just for folks ripping their commercial videos to servers. It takes several days to complete a full transcode my FLAC audio files to the preferred compressed flavor of my audio player, which changes every year or three. I do it very infrequently because of the time it takes. I would prefer to sync with the device on the fly, but processing speeds are just too slow to do that. I'd rather leave the computer running for a couple days once and then sync from that pool (in a couple of minutes), than have to sync for hours every time I connect and change out the content.
It would also nice to be able to cut together home movies and get the final encode times in the minutes range instead of the hours range.
And then, of course, there are hideously inefficient programs like AutoCAD and Adobe Acrobat. I have yet to figure out how updating a cursor position on the screen takes 1.2 billion operations per second, or typing text takes 2 billion and still can't keep up with my slow keyboarding, but AutoCAD appears to have made that happen. And trying to render large PDFs, both for printing and general browsing of large documents is painfully slow. I want to flip through pages of a PDF like I flip though pages of a book, and even when I have a 24x36 sheet of .1" high text which has been vector drawn, I want it to take far less than than the 8-10 seconds it takes to draw the page today...1/5 second is probably the right threshold.
You sound as if you think I'm a McCain supporter. Well, I'll admit there are things I like about him, but (a) I could never support any move which would forward Palin's career as a politician - she's absolute poison - and (b) his radical shift to the religious right in the past 8 years has been embarrassing, and Im not even a registered Republican.
Of course I'll be voting for Obama, and I fully expect him to win. There hasn't been this kind of excitement in the D party for almost half a century, and I think it's well founded. He is the right person to fix our international image, he's the right person to oversee the balance between corporate and personal interests during this economic recovery, and with luck he'll be the right person to persuade an expansion of access to healthcare while keeping the broad market-based service Americans expect. Oh, and RvW will be revisited and overturned if two more conservatives get appointed to the high court. I can simply hope that his SCOTUS choices happen to have a good stance on citizens' stake in the IP battles ahead. It's a fringe issue for the mainstream, really. Luckily, the high court is less corruptible by the same lobbying that forces lopsided laws through congress.
Nobody ever suggested you could run anything on an iPhone, and that makes it no different that most of the other cellular phone devices out there. It comes down to the simplest of playground rules:
My ball, my game.
Not that the playground is the perfect metaphor for business, but it's better than most car analogies.
We got hit by Iraq? Wow, I missed that invasion. Was it naval? Which cities were invaded and had to repel the foreign forces?
Or were you talking about the 9/11 thing where a bunch of militants from a NGO flew planes into several buildings? Did they get funding from Iraq? Perhaps, but they also got funding from Saudi sources and were based out of Afghanistan with that governments "protection."
The invasion of Iraq was sparked by the WMD scare based on faulty intellegence, which was trumped up to whip the country (and world) into a panic...all the way to a little bottle of "chemical agent" shown by Colin Powell to the UN. Sadly, it turned out to be bullshit - and nobody dared call the administration on it.
I won't argue that Saddam was a horrible leader, and that there were terrible things happening in Iraq. But, seriously, there are more problems in the world than we can fix as a single country, and military fixes are a very poor way to try and convince people to see democracy our way. We have done many good things in Iraq, but that doesn't justify, in hindsight, our reason to invade.
It's strong language without the scariness of leaving all the loose ends.
I'd be in your boat if Hillary had won and Palin weren't on the ticket. I can't stand either of them. It's amazing how similar they are, while holding diametrically opposed sociopolitical beliefs. I do agree with you that, in the event McCain wins, he goes back the man he was in 2000 and kicks some serious congressional butt and fixes the deficit and debt before he starts handing money back.
I don't pay much now either, though I just switched to a company group plan (I own the company and felt it was the right thing to do for my employees as soon as I was big enough to form a group). I had a HSA for three years - and they're awesome for a healthy, young person. I spend even less than you for me and my daughter; about $600-800 per year. Wish I could have kept it, but it's not really practical for some of my employees.
Here's the thing - once you get older you're very, very likely to have some sort of maintenance medication; or have to take a course of medication. Pay for a month of, say a blood thinner (if you have a minor stroke or heart attack) or a less usual antibiotic and you could be in for $500-$1000. Maintenance meds, say for diabetes, will run you about $300/month if you are well regulated and don't have problems. Price a colonoscopy or a mammogram with a secondary ultrasound. Lets just say you've got a four figure bill _after_ the health insurance discount.
I'm not old enough to worry about such things, but the people we're talking about are. When you get old things start to break down more frequently. You might be healthy right up to the day you fall over dead, but that's the wild exception, not the rule. If you set basic coverage with a $2400 deductible for seniors, they'll probably hit it every year.
By the way - you will probably want, at some point in the future, to go onto a group plan. See, if you're on an individual plan and you have a problem, your insurance will go up. If you develop a chronic condition (like diabetes), you're likely to be dropped from insurance. They can do that for individuals. For group plans, they can't drop an individual of the group. It's why I have been saying for a decade now that the US govt should open up their FEHB (fed health) program to any US citizen. It's a group of negotiated healthcare rates with several providers, including HMO, PPO, and HSA plans. The group is so large (2,000,000+) and the group includes so may high-risk people (all federal retirees) that the rates are probably close to the general population. Obama is the first candidate to come to the same conclusion an I did. Now, I don't know how he's going to fund getting everybody on the rolls, but simply making it _available_ is a great first step.
While it would be possible to live on $20k per year, it's not exactly living high on the hog. Even if your median-cost house is paid off, you're probably looking at $2000/yr in just taxes and minimal insurance. In many places, taxes are much higher (up to triple that number). $10k for food, $2k for housing that's paid for (god forbid you rent), $4k for health related expenses, $2500 for basic lifeline phone and heat, and you've got $1500 for transportation and all other miscellaneous expenses, and that's presuming you aren't paying for any healthcare premiums. I'd say that's pretty close to "keeping the elderly from starving and being homeless."
The problem with that justification is that there is no record of how many times a particular file has been redistributed. They have attempted to show that downloads have occurred by having their agent download the data, but that has also hit roadblocks.
It may be the case that a file is downloaded 10, 20, or 1000 times. For a balanced p2p network, though, the higher numbers are more unlikely. for a single song uploaded, it may then be downloaded twice with only one additional download charged. If we presume that there are a billion people on the internet, and the series is balanced, then the file need only be downloaded 31 times (2^30, i.e. 30 downloads, plus 1 to get to the original 2 computers) from the original host. That would put the damages at $31.69 from the original host, or about $95 for treble damages in the worst possible statistical case - again given an efficient network. Since the likelihood of a billion downloads from a single source is highly unlikely - the number is probably more likely to top out between 10,000 and 100,000, or $13-$17 per file (Again, $40-50 with treble damages for willful distribution).
While it is theoretically possible to upload many more copies, it is unlikely given that so many programs automatically share all downloaded files by default.
Now, you could end up with quite a bill if you shared a large collection (mine is close to 8000 tracks), but realistically not all those tracks would be uploaded, and very few would cross the 1000 download mark. One might argue that for any common song, the number of seeders present at the time your timestamp would be the basis for the calculation starting point. If you might expect between 20 and 1000 people to have the same track in their library (not unlikely). That starts the power series at 2^5 or 2^10, leaving you closer to $7-8 per file shared, or $25 with treble damages - presuming you can even set a likely number of downloads.
That's a far cry from the $750/song they're asking, or the $150,000 they could pursue. Since standard civil law usually only allows treble damages, it would suggest that the law is severly skewed and should be reviewed by the high court. I wonder who Obama will pick for the two empty seats on the SCOTUS, and what their take on this issue is.
Makes my new home theater look that much more cost competitive!
Seriously, though, this might be fun for a night out. $35 a seat; $70 a couple plus dinner, if it's not foolishly priced (say, entree and side and a beverage for under $40 pp) wouldn't be much more than a night out at Morton's.
Heck, with regular tickets north of $10 in cheap areas, an extra $50 for a "quality" setting might appeal to a certain crowd.
(Actually, given the bits of the HT I built, I'm only in about $2k over the playroom we were finishing anyway. Plus the wine and food is cheaper, although I have to cook. Still, a show a month would cover my costs. WooHoo!)
Taxes and the government programs they fund are not charity, because taxes are taken against your will under penalty of imprisonment.
To turn the tables - if you don't like it, go find another country.
A right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
Have you seen what you get from social security? It's darned near poverty level. The average benefit is something like $13,000 per year, though new retirees may be getting closer to $22,000. I don't know what you think basic living expenses are, but that's putting it pretty far down. Of course, you can continue to work and make money for that cable TV bill so it looks like you're livin' it up while on the dole, but if you make too much (over $13k), you'll see your check drop. I don't care where you live, $22k isn't going to leave room for much more than basic OTA retransmits from most cable cos. I'm a particularly frugal person - my wife and I spend about $220/wk on practically all our daily expenses - groceries, entertainment, personal care, misc. stuff, etc. (no monthly bills) - that's almost $12k per year. Add in power, insurance, non-covered health care costs, transportation and rent and you're probably over the limit in all but a very few places of the country.
By the way - basic healthcare has a pretty dangerous definition. How much does your basic cover? If you have to come up with $4k a year in co-pays and deductable (not uncommon) for "basic" healthcare - and that's easy to do with regular physician visits, standard lab work, one or two minor issues (cold/flu/in-office procedures), and maintenance medication, that's going to stress that $22k budget pretty hard.
Now, I'll agree that average mortality has risen, and I'd prefer the benefits reflect that shift. The original SS system kicked in at the average US mortality age. I think that's not too bad an idea, personally. Still, the age of full benefits is continually increasing, with standard benefits now available at 67 (I think the avg mort age is 77 or 78 now).
So the question is whether we can even afford to allow SS to continually grow as a welfare program for more and more able-bodied people, or whether we should put it back to its stated purpose of preventing the truly elderly from becoming destitute.
I agree that it should be shifted older. People shouldn't be "counting" on SS for retirement, they should be counting on it for the unplanned circumstance of running out of money because you lived too long. I also think that by shifting the age of benefits should come with a shift in benefits to reflect financial pressures on the aged population. Of course, I'd also like to see the system "right-sized" to balance the tax revenue with the payments. Unfortunately, I think the system is so fucked that it's not going to survive the BB generation without massive restructuring, because all the money that has been "set aside" for their SS has actually been spent on other things.
Nice if you can get it, but not really mainstream. My brother in law is a very good MS tech, and was extremely impressed with the 2008 he installed on his laptop. He was concerned it would be a Vista-like experience, which he had tried and rejected already.
Kinda funny, the only thing I use Vista for is a media computer (well, mostly just a movie machine). It's not perfect, but it does a reasonably good job with little setup and maintenance. I do hope 7 is more like 2k8 than vista, as I'm eventually going to have to switch everyone in the office off of XP. I'm not really looking forward to that, mostly beauase I'm not trained in IT, and the further I get from NT (the only real GUI OS I learned the internals of) the harder it gets to find all the places MS likes to hide things.
I don't think the Rs have been socially liberal in the last 4 or 5 decades. The Republicans have, imho, turned into the Christian Right party, and have really pushed a social agenda of intolerance. It's depressing to see, as the large Christian population in the US seems to have been galvanized against non-Christians and traditional minorities. It's easy to forget that black and hispanic citizens are overwhelmingly Christian as well when they don't sit in the pews across from you on Sundays.
Unfortunately, I think the surplus taxes we had in the late 90s and beginning of 2000 (practically none of which was Clinton's doing, btw) were hopelessly squandered on additional government graft and then tax cuts that weren't really necessary to enhance economic growth. The whole security fiasco after 9/11 has been insanely expensive, with very little positive effect. The costs in both taxpayer dollars, and lost opportunity (hours wasted by businesses) has been enormous. And then the unnecessary war in Iraq. With real fiscal care, we probably could have halved the national debt by now. While it certainly would have had repercussions for exporting manufacturers, we could have a very strong dollar today.
No, it has been proven that both parties suck. A study done a couple of months ago projected the two candidates total debt over the next 5 or 8 years, and McCain came out $1T higher than Obama, though both managed to increase the debt. Oddly, I think the fiscally conservative choice is the Democrats. Of course, I have a personal reason for voting Obama - he's the first person to suggest opening up the (private) US govt health benefits program to citizens. It's an expensive plan, don't get me wrong, but it is very good and would provide a stable place for anyone to get long term health coverage. Given that individual plans can be terminated if you get sick, having a guaranteed group plan that can't "kick you out" is a big deal.
Looks like the cheapest option is a 5 CAL install, at $999 SRP - about $700 OEM street price. Hard to swallow for a legitimate license of the software.
I feel your pain...or rather I felt your pain in the past. About 10 years ago my wife and I made "too much" to get a tax deduction for education tuition we paid and still didn't make enough to afford any local housing (LA basin). Even with a child, I don't think that the child tax credits / deductions are a good idea. They tend to trick stupid people into thinking that if they have more children their taxes with go down and they'll have more money at the end of the day. Personally, I think the government should be doing more PSAs on the cost of raising children - make people understand the $15,000+/yr cost to raise them to age 18 and they might think twice about skipping the rubbers.
While I wouldn't give up my daughter for anything, the resource drain for just basic stuff is staggering. I honestly don't know how someone on basic wages makes ends meet without seriously missing something.
Probably not. Generally, all the terms of service can provide for is termination of service. Now, if there are copyright or other IP violations, that's a separate matter, but this sounds like data which is not copyrightable. Unauthorized access usually means that you have _accessed_ a computer without authorization (such as through someone else's account). Here, they're getting legitimate accounts but _using_ them in a way that was not permitted or authorized. Note that the difference is in unauthorized _use_ versus unauthorized _access_. The Blizzard case was, iirc, a civil case, not a criminal one. While a civil case could be brought in this instance, it would be the corporation on the filing, not the individual.
It's cheap relative to the existing small Dell laptops. The E4200 is the latest in the line - 12" screen, intel processors, battery life exceeding 6 hours (much more with the add-on battery), and thinner (.8" vs .9"), lighter (2.2lb vs 2.7), and with more options generally, including a full-up docking station option.
Sure, the newest series will set you back 2 grand (though sales do come up quite frequently), but the older versions which are the D4xxx series can be found on ebay for about $400-$600. They are, of course, a smidge heavier and thicker that the mini 12 (3lb and 1"), but - again - they're a full pc for what you're paying for a netbook.
Me? Well, the wife has a D420. It's fantastic. I am trying to decide between a precision M2400 and an M6400 - light and nimble vs. no compromises speed and having to reinforce the seams in my backpack. I've got an M70 as my primary machine, and it's good but getting a bit long in the tooth for my CAD apps. I'm still waiting for a netbook in a tablet form factor. I'd really like to have something about 2lbs that I can turn portrait and just surf/read PDFs with a pop-up onscreen keyboard.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be selective with the child deductions - I don't see a reason for anyone to get them. I'm not right enough to suggest people pay additional taxes for each child - though that would make sense as so many government services are geared towards children. Of course, I'd pay quite a bit extra without the credit, having a child myself.
I'm not specifically opposed to it (the EIC), as I think the basis has merit and don't necessarily have a suggestion for fixing it. But it is something that people have to consider when talking about brackets - very few people realize that this "negative" bracket exists.
I still agree with a higher poster that the "resdistribution" is scare tactic bullshit; easily 90% of the electorate for both sides receives more services than they pay for anyway.
I'll grant that sole proprietors get dicked in a variety of ways,
Actually the sole proprietor, along with S-corps, get a pretty wide variety of benefits. Overall, the smart self employed can deduct many things that an employee cannot. The savvy businessman can make much of their mileage tax deductible. Sure you pay both sides of FICA, but you're also getting paid what you "bill", which is a lot more than what wages are (generally 200% to 400%).
I hold very little regard for business people who complain about taxes. I run a small business (S-corp), 5 years old, with 4 employees. Yes, taxes suck but guess what - I don't pay all that much. I get to put away over $15k a year into retirement accounts. My wife, who works 10-15 hours a week can put away another $15k. We get the child tax credit even if she doesn't work "enough" because she drives a company car and about 50% of the automotive expenses get put on her W2 as "income".We pay taxes on that...but they really just go to getting the CTC back.
As a bonus, I take a reasonable salary and then everything else that comes in is "profit," taken as an owner's draw and not subject to FICA.
Part of being in business is having someone who can make the right decisions. My wife just so happens to have been an accountant for a decade, and has done some HR. My accountant, who gets $700-$1000 a year from me, makes sure we're paying all the taxes required, and taking all the deductions we are allowed to. Heck, I get to write off $100k a year in capital expenses if I have the income to use. Quite honestly, if I get to the point where I'm making - no, profiting - $250,000 a year after all expenses, I'm not going to be bitching about paying an extra 3-4% of the dollars over $250,000. It's just not something I'm going to waste time worrying about.
Well, it goes directly to "poor" people, too. Unfortunately (sort of) there is a negative tax bracket in this country. It's called the earned income tax credit. I'm not really, really against it, but it does cause some issues with making taxes somewhat fair and equitable. Having a negative bracket, imho, is a bit too far. Then again, I don't think you should get a tax break for having kids - in the modern world, they're an optional luxury. (FWIW, I have one, and that's all I feel I can afford).
As for the top tax brackets - yes I feel they should pay more. Hell, I'd be happy to see a 7.5% "bonus" tax kick in right where Social Security taxes stop. But that wouldn't be very popular. Besides, if small business owners manage to profit more than $250k/yr, the best way to reduce thta tax liability is to expand the business with either capital investments or - better yet - more employees or better benefits. Every dollar spent on employees is deducted from your taxable income. QED. Invest back in your community and the government won't take any more of your money. Keep it to yourself, and the government will use some of that extra to provide services - some of which (surprise) will end up back in your community!
Yeah, something like ISO. They're entirely impartial and have never been swayed from what's best for everyone (cough).